Case Study: Optimized Financial and Operational Reporting

The Organization

Global energy leader providing research and advisory services for energy sector development, economics, and sustainability.

The Challenge

The organization is made up of scientists and thought leaders who conduct advanced research to improve outcomes in the energy sector. They use Clarity, a Gartner Magic Quadrant leading solution, to manage and track the progress of all their research projects.

The global energy leader needed a way to extract, visualize, and analyze their Clarity data using their reporting tool of choice – Microsoft Power BI. They wanted to be able to see timesheet compliance and financial data for research projects, so that they could make data-backed decisions to optimize spend and plan for future projects.

For timesheets, the organization needed a way to understand the discrepancy between allocated time and actuals for projects. They needed these insights to improve forecasting and cost analysis.

For financials, they needed to see financial aggregations or roll-ups for different divisions and compare actual spend against forecast and budget. They could use this view to improve planning and allocations for current and future research projects.

Additionally, the organization was encountering challenges with employees not logging actuals or systematically tracking costs within Clarity, which affected their ability to pull cost data into Power BI for analysis.

The Solution

The client partnered with Rego Consulting to install and customize pre-built Power BI Dashboards that integrated with their Clarity instance. These dashboards could even be viewed within the organization’s intranet portal, allowing leaders to easily get the information they needed. Additionally, Rego offered best practice guidance to improve data quality within Clarity – leading to better reports and insights for decision making.

Rego installed a Power BI timesheet dashboard to ensure employees were working on the right initiatives. This dashboard helped the organization track variances and identify missing timesheets and bottlenecks. It also enabled the global energy leader to instantly spot discrepancies between allocations and actuals at the project or individual level.

Rego also created a customized financial summary Power BI dashboard that enabled the organization’s leaders to instantly view and analyze how money was being spent on projects, what financial benefits work was projected to generate, and compare budgets to actuals at the project and investment type level. This included a detailed view of who was allocating funding to projects, who was logging the actuals, and what the discrepancies were.

Lastly, Rego guided the organization through systematically tracking costs in Clarity and loading cost metrics into Clarity. They also helped the energy leader create and implement a plan for employees to start tracking time in Clarity. With these improvements, the organization gained the needed data for their Power BI reports.

The Results

Better Data Quality: The global energy leader now has the processes and tools in place to collect the data they need within Clarity for their Microsoft Power BI reports.

Improved Visibility and Decision Making: With the new dashboards, leaders have visibility into research project financials and timesheet compliance. They can now make data-backed decisions quickly to optimize spending and plan more effectively for future research projects.

The Road Ahead:

During the next year, the client will continue to partner with Rego to leverage Clarity’s rich capabilities and mature their SPM and PPM practices.

Rego is currently helping the energy sector leader improve their strategic planning and Objective and Key Results (OKR) tracking with Clarity’s out of the box Roadmaps and OKR features. The adoption of OKR tracking for research projects will help the client become nimbler and reach their goals faster.

In addition to strategic planning, the client is also preparing to adopt improved annual planning processes and value loops.

Lastly, the energy leader is consulting Rego to develop Power BI reports that enhance and modernize their existing reports from other reporting tools, aiming for a more automated and visually appealing presentation.